Mega Hits 1 Million Users in Less than a Day, Crippling Performance

The site proved a huge success, so much so that demand is much greater than expected

Mega is straining under the load

To great fanfare, Kim Dotcom knows how to put on a show, Mega has been launched and it's now available to everyone. The service is pretty much as was promised, a web interface, client-side encryption, 50GB of storage for free and so on.

However, there do seem to be some issues, caused by all the initial attention. The site is rather slow, upload speeds were abysmal and download speeds were non-existent since downloads wouldn't start.

That's perhaps to be expected of any new site launching with so much spotlight over it, plenty of people have tried to give the new site a try.

In fact, Dotcom revealed that the new Mega had seen one million visitors and 500,000 registered users within 14 hours of it going live.

Obviously, the team was prepared for a big launch, but not something like this. It had 100,000 users within the first hour.

"If you are currently experiencing slow access to #Mega its because of the unbelievable demand. We are working on more capacity," Dotcom explained.

There's no reason to believe that the problems won't be solved momentarily, by adding new hardware and optimizing the infrastructure and also thanks to the fact that the surge in interest will die down soon enough, especially since the site isn't working properly.

Mega launched on January 20, 6:48 am local time, the one-year anniversary of the raid on Dotcom's mansion to the minute. It proved hugely popular, the traffic hit 10 Gbps within 10 minutes of going live and it picked up from there.